Yes, I too discovered the film first, and now finding this novel took a little doing. And while the novel and film are based upon the same original premise (that zombie-like behavior results from an infection of language itself), the novel is altogether different, both superior and faulty in its approaches.

The real strength of the novel is, thankfully, its style and Burgess's background in the functions of language. From the first paragraph, readers are unbalanced, recognizing eventually that the very problem that will creep its way across Ontario--a kind of aphasia--is internalized in the authoring and reading itself. Readers experience character inner desperate and chaotic dialogue, but also we lose track of events as real or imagined, psychoses or graphic mortalities. It's forgivable that some readers might reason that the first 60 or more pages are mere figments of our protagonist.

And our protagonists in this first half of the book themselves suffer from mental disorders; ironically, this offers them some protection from the "healthy" citizens who succumb more easily.

But the novel moves to a second half where the narrative camera pans back, and we see the discussions of doctors and other field experts. We are offered new characters who are living in the early days of the zombie "apocalypse:" children who are now homeless and without support systems as local authority falls apart; media personalities who continue to live as ever, treating this newest phenomenon as spectator sport. The horror, of course, is not in the zombies at all but our response to them.

Along the way, Burgess digs us deeply into the linguistic plague that has emerged from our evolution, firing and misfiring on what lies latent in our morphemes and collocations.  And here, then, the foreground and background of the horror story shift: it is not merely that zombies are a metaphor for the perils underlaying communication; it is that (failed) communication is the subject to which a zombie story is occasionally attached. Narrative arcs fall apart, protagonists vanish, and we are left with events, only as significant or poignant as we have the language capacity to attach to them.

I understand (I think) Burgess's deconstructive goals here--as language falls, so even does the structure of the narrative we read. If so, though, this could have been handled either more forthrightly or altogether less so. As it stands, while both parts of the novel require some careful navigation by readers, the first half rewards; the second half endures. 

This, for me though, is an overall small matter compared to the larger conceit he undertakes. Pontypool--in its microcosmic film setting or more expansive book form--remains my favorite take on the classic creature, the un-dead who are all of us under a certain arrangement of persuasive noises.